MLCreations Photography Blog – An exploration of how I see the world around me

Photo Fix Friday

The second edition of Photo Fix Friday is here. I don’t believe I can call it a regular feature of my blog yet, but I am working on it. Surprisingly there are quite a few opportunities in my early images.

This Morning Trail image was captured on my way to work back in April 2012. The town had cleared off some land designated for a new town park and offices. It was a cold morning and the frost hung heavy on the ground. I spotted the sun breaking the horizon through the trees. It was creating some great shadows in the path toward the woods. I pulled the car around and returned to the small entrance. I grabbed the camera with its tripod and quickly captured the scene.

What I remember most about the view was the frost on the grass along with the light and shadows. As you can see in the first image I over-processed the scene by increasing the colors. I’m sure I ran the image through my Topaz Labs Adjust program to create a pseudo HDR effect and in the process destroyed what it was about the scene that made me stop. If you look in the tops of the trees on the right of the image you can spot the halo effect of using the HDR function too much in Adjust. Another sure sign for me is the loss of blue in the sky. The sun was not that over powering, that is all in my post-processing.

The second image is basically straight out of the camera. This is what I initially captured. The horizon is tilted and the image is a little underexposed. You can also see the true color of the sky as well as the frost on the grass.

Now for the fix. I changed the crop that I used. I know I went with the 16×9 crop in the original because I had to place the horizon using the rule of thirds. I was still working on understanding everything I had been reading and was not focusing on the feel of the image. For this new image I stayed with the original 3×2 image ratio but brought the top right corner in and down.

My tweaks in Lightroom were done to lighten up the shadows and tone down the highlights. I did not want to over saturate the image again so I only did minor adjusts to the color. The frost needed to stay visible to me. You can still see the effects of the sun but it is not overpowering the image. I also wanted to keep as much of the shadows as possible but did bring back some of the detail hidden in the darker portions of the image.

My fix on this image is truer to what I remember about the scene. It is not necessarily the way every image needs to be processed. Some images I process with a look in mind and proceed to change the image to achieve that look. For me this image needed to be brought back to what is in my memory.

Welcome to my little corner of the internet where I will be chronicling my exploration into my new photography obsession. I do not have a specific topic or style so the posts will be eclectic and random. I hope that as this site grows you will see improvements in both my photography and my writing.

Take a look around and hopefully you'll find something interesting. Feel free to borrow any image you like as long as it is used for personal use and not for a commercial endeavor. I would hope you respect my creativity and will not alter the image in any way. If you do find something you wish to use, please include a link back to my blog with appropriate credit. Thanks!